Outcome of the European Union Referendum

Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield Excerpts

Tuesday 5th July 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield (CB)]

My Lords, we are living through a molten time for our people, our politics, our society and our country. We are living in the aftershock of an extraordinary event of a magnitude which, in my judgment, none of us has experienced in peacetime. In my lifetime—I was born in 1947—there has been but one geopolitical shift that comes near to it. I refer to the disposal of the British Empire—another dash for the exit. That remarkable transition, however, was very different from the caesura of Thursday, 23 June 2016, as it took place over several years, its timetable was largely, if not wholly, in the hands of UK Ministers and it left remarkably few scars on the surface of our country’s emotional geography.

The decision to leave the European Union, although its ingredients were long in the making, was, by contrast, sudden and breath-taking. It was as though all the dials needed resetting almost in one go. Whitehall departments were unprepared, as other noble Lords have mentioned. Apart from the Treasury, which had plans in place with the Bank of England to stabilise the markets, government ministries were expressly forbidden to draw up contingency plans for exit.

We may pride ourselves on being a back-of-the-envelope nation, but this was excessive. Never have I encountered so many people with so few ideas about what to do in the face of a first order crisis. The litany of post-war crises, which, as a professional historian, I write about from time to time—the sterling devaluations of 1949 and 1967, the Suez affair of 1956, the IMF crisis of 1976 and Black Wednesday in 1992—seem mere blips on the radar screen in comparison.

Never in my lifetime has our politics seemed so envenomed, poisoned still further by a palpable dearth of trust between the governed and the governors. All this at a time when our two major political parties give every appearance of eating themselves, with copious tranches of nervous energy absorbed by their internal stresses and strains.

In my judgment, the referendum result was like a lightning flash illuminating a political and social landscape long in the changing, exposing yet again fissures we knew about—disparities of wealth and life chances—but whose depth and rawness I admit I had not fully fathomed.

What can be done? Winston Churchill, that supreme wartime crisis manager, had a favourite phrase about “rising to the level of events”. That is our pressing duty—all of us in public and political life and the civil and diplomatic services too.

It is time to stand back and take a long, candid and careful look at ourselves. May I suggest that we need two separate but related inquiries? First, our place in the world. Can we, should we, still aspire to punch heavier than our weight in the world in the way that we do when on autopilot as a nation with a remarkable past and a continuing and sustained appetite for global influence? Secondly, we need to look at our internal constitutional arrangements—the relationships between the nations, regions and localities of the United Kingdom. In my darker moments, I think that 23 June lit a fuse beneath the Union. I profoundly hope not, as a man who loves Scotland deeply and cherishes the union of the United Kingdom almost beyond measure.

My preferred instruments for these inquiries would be a pair of royal commissions—an ancient institution, rusted by disuse, but it is time to unsheathe it. Failing that, perhaps a brace of Joint Committees of Parliament.

Of one thing I am certain: now is the time to think above our weight, to draw deep from our wells of tolerance and civility; perhaps even to fashion a new political vocabulary to help us think aloud together as a people and a nation about what is to become of us; to rise to the level of events; and perhaps even to surprise ourselves and the watching world by the quality, the care and the foresight of what we do.